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Fishing for oil and meat drives defaunation of deepwater sharks and rays
- causal 3y agoWas shocked to read that shark livers are used for biodiesel. Feels like 18th century whaling for lamp-oil. Here's a Forbes article that seems almost enthusiastic about this as a "green" energy source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/melissacristinamarquez/2020/03/08/the-future-of-biofuel-may-include-shark-liver-oil/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/melissacristinamarquez/2020/03/...
- rocketbop 3y ago> For those sharks who have perished due to becoming bycatch, this allows a unique opportunity to have their livers provide valuable products like biodiesel, squalene, and omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs) –including eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA; also icosapentaenoic acid) and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA). Afterall, the major constituents of WSLO are triglycerides (TG), diacylglycerol ethers (DAGE), and squalene. What a strange article.
- darth_avocado 3y ago“Oops, look at this shark that I totally didn’t mean to catch. Ohh well, now that it’s dead, I can maybe use the bycatch for shark fin soup.”
- FrustratedMonky 3y ago"perished due to becoming bycatch" So sorry we accidently killed you. In order to give your life some meaning, we've come up with "unique opportunity to have their livers provide valuable products"
- Simon_ORourke 3y agoThat's all we can ask for in many careers
- ElevenLathe 3y agoI doubt I will ever provide as much value as a shark liver's worth of biodiesel.
- cgannett 3y agoYour employer frantically googling how much biodiesel can be produced from a human liver
- throwway120385 3y agoIn modern capitalism your life only has meaning if you produce products.
- randomsolutions 3y agoTo who? As opposed to?
- 123yawaworht456 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_who_does_not_work,_neither_shall_he_eat#Soviet_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_who_does_not_work,_neither_...
- FrustratedMonky 3y agoThat isn't an argument that Capitalism is good, or better. In Capitalism, if you don't work, you don't eat. So finding a quote about communism that says same thing, is not making any point that one is better or worse. The difference is in Communism, there should always be 'some work'. If you are willing to work, there is work. Even if it is some public works project. In Capitalism, maybe not. Nobody is looking out for you. If you don't have the skills for what is in demand right now, then so sorry, go ahead and die.
- 123yawaworht456 3y agosure. 'some work' under communism will yield you a bed and and a few bowls of gruel per day. in the US, there are 'working poor'. under communism, there are 'working poor and starving'. at the time when skilled blue collar workers in the US had two story houses and multiple cars per family, the same people in the USSR lived in communal apartments (with 3-4 people per room and 3-4 families per bathroom and kitchen) and commuted to work in overcrowded buses. even towards the end, in the 80's, after several decades of relative peace and prosperity, even engineers and scientists had a standard of living far below the level of 'working poor' in the US. having a small concrete box in a commie block and a shitty car (that you had to wait several years for the privilege of being allowed to buy for a very sizeable amount of money) was the Soviet dream.
- nonethewiser 3y agoThis seems overly cynical. If sharks are purposefully being killed like this then thats one thing. But that’s not being alleged. If sharks are accidentally killed then it’s good that they’re making use of them to some extent. Hopefully they can make even more use of them.
- dghlsakjg 3y agoThey are being killed through the use of specific fishing techniques. Anyone using those techniques KNOWS that this is going to happen. Adding a financial incentive to continue harmful practices is NOT a good thing.
- Hnrobert42 3y agoThey could reduce the amount of bycatch, like they have with dolphins. They won’t if there is economic incentive not to.
- refactor_master 3y agoBut dolphins and giraffes are cute. Sharks and cattle aren’t.
- jprd 3y agoLegions of toddlers demand you review the body of work from Pinkfong, and then reconsider your inclusion of sharks as "not cute".
- causal 3y agoYou're essentially saying that accidental shark death is bad, so we should make it on purpose. We should be punishing bycatch, not incentivizing it.
- oregano 3y agoThis idea really disgusts me. If an animal is “accidentally” killed then the first action should be to punish the people who did this and then take steps to ensure it does not happen again. Just allowing capitalism to continue to wreak havoc on our planet is so obviously not moral thing to do.
- downWidOutaFite 3y ago> the authors stress that is should remain a “waste” product and not create a market for increased shark fishing
- dev1ycan 3y agoOh wow I caught a shark, conveniently enough though, I happen to have this factory with the exact processes necessary to extract materials out of the shark.
- whywhywhywhy 3y agoSo it's more a greenwashing initiative causes the problem... Similar vibe as replacing leather with microplastics or meat that can exist anywhere with deforesting the amazon for meat alternatives ingredients.
- digging 3y ago> meat that can exist anywhere with deforesting the amazon for meat alternatives ingredients. Is this the case? A major problem with beef is that so much of it comes from the cleared Amazon. Also, meat intrinsically takes more space than vegetables because we still have to clear land to grow feed for the meat, so a 1:1 replacement of Amazonian beef with soy and chickpeas or whatever would be a massive increase in yield.
- causal 3y agoYeah magnitude matters. Clearing rainforest is generally bad but if meat requires 5x the land of plants then we shouldn't make false equivalencies.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- samatman 3y agoIf one discovers that a brand of tshirt is being manufactured using slave labor, a reasonable response is to buy another brand of tshirt. Clearly more is needed to solve the problem, but the slave labor doesn't "rub off" on the other tshirt, it's obviously silly to say "don't wear tshirts, some of them are made by slaves". It's no different with beef. Most beef in the USA comes from the USA, and you might raise various objections about the treatment of cattle, pollution from runoff, and so on, but it isn't contributing to rainforest deforestation, so that isn't a good reason to not eat it.
- wyre 3y agoCrops grown for animal feed is still a major cause of deforestation and USA beef can still be culpable for contributing. Realistically, I think most US cattle is fed from domestic feed, but I know Brazil exports a lot of animal feed to Asia and Europe. To expand on your metaphor, not only are the t-shirts made with slave labor, but the cotton grown is harvested and milled by slave labor and without supply chain transparency it’s impossible to know if the new brand is also using the slave-labor cotton.
- verisimi 3y agoI know... But when you think about it, it is renewable! I mean, even fossil fuels are renewable eventually....
- hedgehog 3y agoWhaling continued until much more recently. I knew a guy in the early 2000s that made his money in the whale oil business and he was around 70 at the time.
- aidenn0 3y ago"Save the whales" was the cliche environmental slogan when I was growing up in the 1980s. They even made a Star Trek movie where that was a major plot point.
- JohnMakin 3y agoThere are other threats to the deep ocean other than fishing - From what I understand, whale falls are a big driver of biodiversity in the deep ocean, so while it wouldn’t appear intuitive that reducing the number of whales in our oceans would have that kind of effect, ecosystems are closely intertwined and one change can have far reaching effects.
- hvs 3y agoThis is the first I've ever heard that term but it instantly makes a lot sense. Found my wiki rabbit hole for today. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whale_fall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whale_fall
- JohnMakin 3y agoI'm pretty sure I first heard about it on this site - it's very interesting.
- pvaldes 3y agocheck also: marine snow
- selimthegrim 3y agoWould that the doom of X/Twitter would do the same for startups (although I suppose that graphic was in the opposite direction)
- srameshc 3y agoMaybe we need to have a list of the companies who are in this chain for profit.
- xnx 3y agoWhat's happening to the oceans is truly awful: overfishing, bycatch, bottom trawling (like strip mining or clear-cutting of the ocean floor), ocean acidification, ocean warming, agricultural runoff leading to algal blooms, noise pollution, and plastic pollution. It would never be tolerated if it was more visible.
- TOGoS 3y ago> It would never be tolerated if it was more visible. Idk man, we put up with a lot of horrible stuff up here, too. Not so much because we like it but because nobody who isn't a billionaire (or perhaps heads a powerful but privately owned company) has much say in any of it. Heck, even my city council does whatever the heck the businesses want, no matter how big a crowd shows up at their meetings and says "please no." (We don't have any ocean, here, but we do have lakes that have been getting more and more polluted for decades because nobody has the backbone to tell folks upstream to keep their fertilizer out of the water, or whatever.)
- rcpt 3y ago> even my city council does whatever the heck the businesses want So there's lots of new housing being built by big developers?
- TOGoS 3y agoThere is, actually. Madison, Wisconsin I'm talking about here. New apartment buildings going up all over the place. Now whether it'll actually make living here more affordable, we shall see, but I have my doubts.
- hackerlight 3y agoTragedy of the commons + diffuse interests vs concentrated interests.
- boringg 3y agoIts the wild west out there - definitely needs help. Its the ultimate tragedy of the commons problem with global implications.
- causal 3y agoShout out to the folks at Global Fishing Watch doing amazing work tracking unregulated fishing activity. Just need policy to catch up with reality now. https://globalfishingwatch.org/map/index https://globalfishingwatch.org/map/index
- marricks 3y agoI feel like if global actually policy helped we wouldn't be in this "never ending increase in CO2 emission" hellscape we live in now. Like, not to knock on someone else's work, but I bet if we had globally enforced regulation while we may get nice bylines of "the blue fin tuna has made a rebound" the global fish populations would continue to plummet and the oceans acidify even further.
- causal 3y agoWell we haven't ever had global policy enforcing CO2 reduction so I don't think we can conclude it doesn't work. But it's also not a fair comparison, reducing shark bycatch and reducing human CO2 output are completely different problems with different scale. I don't think giving up is acceptable either.
- marricks 3y ago> I don't think giving up is acceptable either. 100% agree here.
- bearjaws 3y agoJust need to start sinking ships, sadly. The rate of enforcement is far too slow, and you have far too many nations as bad actors, there will never be effective enforcement.
- shitcoder 3y agoDefinitely. Shout out to the effort they've put into their api's as well. I've integrated them into a product and raise awareness of sustainable fishing for several major retail outlets.
- WillAdams 3y agoThere was an XKCD on this: https://what-if.xkcd.com/33/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/33/ My grandfather lived in a time when commercial hunting ceased to be viable and was outlawed --- I worry my children will live in a world where fishing goes the same way, which given the percentage of the world's population which depends on seafood is existential.
- ezxs 3y agoAre we going to keep avoiding the fact that the population growth can not be the goal any more? In fact it's better for this planet if the number of people actually decreased? BTW no on is advocating doing it forcefully, but just through distributing contraception and educating women, that seems keep the population stable.
- betaby 3y agoIt a very unpopular idea in this forum and in general in the western world which is basically 'growth by all possible means'. More consumers - better.
- bitwize 3y agoThen we need to shut down the "Western world". A blanket ban on excess overbreeding and polluting technology. Maybe the NWO should consider using their stockpiles of sterilization drugs bound for the water supplies...
- CatWChainsaw 3y agoThe "exponential growth forever" microsecond of human history will be looked on as a fever dream in the future, and hopefully the masses who support that ideology will be remembered with the same contempt as slavers.
- slothtrop 3y agoDegrowth as a concept is about economic growth. Not only is it popular with the far-left/environmentalist intersection, they don't seem to want to consider population at all. Part of this is because it feels incongruent with their stance on immigration, even though they aren't the same things. Even those enthusiastic about economic growth are at least more likely to be honest with themselves that scaling up is creating pressure on the environment, despite the improvements in innovation. This is because of soaring global demand (particularly from the East). There are, of course, techno-optimists who want to believe that a sustainable future is a foregone conclusion. Even if we think we'll get there eventually, the damage in the meantime can be considerable.
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- drewm1980 3y agoI've got 99 reasons to be vegan, but shark extinction... is yet another one.
- z_open 3y agoPeople are still really viscerally against veganism. Really this isn't even close to the main issues with the animal husbandry industry, including famine in developing countries https://planetforward.org/story/the-dirt-on-beef-global-hunger-climate-change/ https://planetforward.org/story/the-dirt-on-beef-global-hung...
- raptorraver 3y agoIt's not cow but how. Modern agriculture methods are very destructive for the environment. The biggest problem isn't even the greenhouse emissions but the way we are destroying the living topsoil by our methods and then trying to fix the problem with fossil fuel based systems - diesel based tilling and fertilisers. Veganism can't solve those problems either. Luckily there is a growing movement of regenerative agriculture which focuses on the soil health and maximing the carbon sequestering to the soil. It also makes much more sense from the financial point of view for the farmer. https://regenerationinternational.org/why-regenerative-agriculture/ https://regenerationinternational.org/why-regenerative-agric...
- z_open 3y agoVeganism doesn't solve every issue, but it makes them better almost immediately. For the problem you mention, we would need to farm substantially less with Veganism. Feed ratios for cows is around 7:1 when I checked last. So it absolutely is cow.
- raptorraver 3y agoYou're propably correct about the feed ratio but cows eat grasses and hay that aren't consumable by humans. In warm countries that's not a problem, people could grow there crops that humans can eat, but in big parts of world (like here in north where I live) grasses are best thing to grow. Also grasslands are best carbon sink we currently have (https://climatechange.ucdavis.edu/climate/news/grasslands-more-reliable-carbon-sink-than-trees https://climatechange.ucdavis.edu/climate/news/grasslands-mo...) and you can't have those without ruminants. Also it's good to remember how much food we waste each year. We could easily feed the world already now but it doesn't seem to be priority for the people in charge. That said I'm on a same side with vegans, I don't like the current way we produce food and I'd like to see a big systemic change there. But I think vegans don't take into account how complex problems we are dealing with - nature, agriculture's economics and eating habits and nutritional requirements of humans.
- narrator 3y ago[flagged]
- aktuel 3y agoHumanity is eating its own limbs.
- vondur 3y agoYes, international waters are a kind of Wild West: https://insightcrime.org/investigations/argentina-plunder-danger-atlantic-sea-shelf-iuu-fishing/ https://insightcrime.org/investigations/argentina-plunder-da...
- uxcolumbo 3y agoFor people who care about the future of our biosphere, what would be the most logical next step? Reduce or stop eating factory farmed meat / industrial fishing products?
- digging 3y agoThat's a personal step which is good to take for credibility, but the only two effective things to do are: 1. Violence against corrupt capital-owners (I'm not advocating this, for legal reasons, just saying it could be effective) 2. Organizing your fellow malcontents (that is: people who give a quarter of a fuck about human dignity), which is hard work but can really pay off systematically. Note though that you may still end up with some of the same legal risks as #1.
- jajko 3y agoYeah eco-terrorism will really persuade masses about your cause, what a non-smart advice to be polite. I don't claim I have a solution, but above is not one
- digging 3y agoI didn't say the goal was to persuade masses. That's what organizing does.
- LinXitoW 3y agoHmm, if there was a movement that organized around ending animal ag, and they called for individuals to stop consuming animals, would that not count as working towards systematic change? Conversely, all your examples also require individuals to make individual choices. Arguably, no systemic change has ever happened without individuals choosing to act.
- digging 3y ago> Hmm, if there was a movement that organized around ending animal ag, and they called for individuals to stop consuming animals, would that not count as working towards systematic change? Not really. Not if it's just a propaganda/awareness campaign. It would only matter if anti-industrial agriculturalists were organizing, defined as building resilient social-political structures which could change policy at increasingly large scales. > Arguably, no systemic change has ever happened without individuals choosing to act. I don't even think that's arguable except in the case of natural disasters bringing down systems entirely. The individual choices that matter, for the disenfranchised with revolutionary ideas, are the choices and actions that build organizational power. And building power is extremely grueling work when money is neither the goal nor vehicle, so that's why we see so little of it. That's why I'm not currently doing it, for the time being.
- karim79 3y agoA close relative of mine had a bottle of 'shark cartilage' capsules which he proudly presented to me, I must have been around 14-15 years old. The idea behind them, as he explained, was that since sharks are basically immune to cancer, (which they are not[0]), taking those supplements could therefore help prevent cancer. I remember thinking to myself, this is bullshit. By that same logic I could pulverise a cheetah, take the resulting 'product', and outrun most living creatures. By the very same logic pulverising scorpions and consuming supplements made from the powder should give us at least some resistance to ionizing radiation. [0] https://academic.oup.com/jnci/article/97/21/1562/2521495 https://academic.oup.com/jnci/article/97/21/1562/2521495